“Five industry leaders becoming one.

Imagine the makers of hundreds of industry leading products – including Pro Tools, Media Composer, Oxygen 8, Sibelius and Pinnacle Studio – coming together as one company. A team of artists and industry experts focused on helping people create the most listened to, most watched, and most loved work in the world. We see endless possibilities.“

Sounds nice and I see a lot of possibilities too, mainly because Avid seemed to be asleep for quite a while. And what we have seen from Avid in the last years is basically a downsizing: Avid selling Softimage|XSI to Autodesk, Pinnacle selling the PCTV-line to Hauppauge etc.

That must not be bad. Contrary, you can say it is a concentration on core assets. And what we saw with the 3.5/7.5 releases of Media Composer and News Cutter it is going in the right direction, for example Pro Tools and Media Composer can co-exist on the same machine, AMA makes tapeless workflows easier, “Advanced Keyframes” are supported by more effects, keyframeable color correction is very nice and so on. Even working with RED-footage has been made easier with "Metafuze".

But today I think it is most important to have a strong digital production suite. Meaning that importing footage and editing is just the beginning of a workflow that became very common to many of us: sweetening color eventually in a third party app like Adobe After Effects, doing composites and animations in After Effects, sweetening Audio in a third party app like ProTools, encoding files for the web, CD, DVD, Blu-Ray or just doing a quick clip as a transition in a DVD-menu.

And there I definitely see deficits in Avids integration of its different components. The “Creative Suite” from Adobe, for example, has grown very strong in the last years through tight integration of all its components. I mean, managing assets with “Bridge” became really comfortable and you do not even have to render After Effects projects to get them in Premiere or Encore: you just drag the project file in the other application and it understands the format. The same is true for Apples Final Cut and Motion, although I think the Adobe suite is already stronger than the Apple "Studio", when it comes to really being a full solution suite. Avid might say “AvidFX composites must not be rendered out to Avid, too!”, well I say every time I use AvidFX I feel thrown back in the mid-nineties by the poor UI, the rather slow responsiveness and so on. While the workflow is quite good, the application sucks. The same is true when you compare AvidDVD/DVDit with Encore.

This all must not play a role for big post-facilities, who have the manpower and the budget to have a special application and a specialist for every step in the workflow. But they also have the possibility to go with higher-end solutions then Avid. I think of Autodesk or Quantel, for example.

But it definitely plays a role for freelancers, small project studios, independent film makers, in-the-field editors and so on. And this is the market segment that would have earned some attention by Avid. Those are the people who stand loyal to Avid because they like the strong editing capabilities of Media Composer. But those people also can not afford the price for the new MojoDX for what it gives to them. Those people are not willing to pay extra for .OMF-support in ProTools (a 3.5 MB programm snippet of code for $ 500.-). Those people already use After Effects and Photoshop. And if Premiere gets more development for another couple of years, maybe it will become the best solution for some of those.

But instead of bringing real new features into the Avid world, or ultimately developing their own encoding-, compositing- and authoring tools (which hopefully changes in the coming months) they are wasting money on public relations and the agencies for that new logo. I have seen so many of that kind of reorganizations in the IT-market, the mobile phone market, the industrial markets (yes they call it "Siemens One"!) and I remember not one of those reorganisations leading to a better company (neither for the customers nor for the employees!). By the way, will there be a round of dismissals in any of the Avid companies?

So please, make Media Composer v4 a real digital production suite. I know you have the knowledge and the technics and the specialists. We really need and want those “seamless workflows” you always talk about. And if you want to force us to use your hardware (nothing else does Apple for decades) make it affordable!